Tag Archives: Henry Thomas

Since I love awards and I love making lists, it’s an annual tradition that I list who and what would be nominated if I had all the power. Keep in mind that what you’re seeing below are not necessarily my predictions of what or who will actually be nominated. Many of the shows listed below will probably be ignored tomorrow morning. Instead, this is a list of the nominees and winners if I was the one who was solely responsible for picking them.

Because I got off to a late start this year, I’m only listing the major categories below. I may go back and do a full, 100-category list sometime tomorrow. Who knows? I do love making lists.

Anyway, here’s what would be nominated and what would win if I had all the power! (Winners are listed in bold.)

Today, I continue my look back at the previous year with my picks for the best of Lifetime in 2018! Below, you’ll find my nominations for the best Lifetime films and performances of 2018! Winners are starred and listed in bold!

(As a guide, I used the credits for the imdb. If anyone has been miscredited or left out, please feel free to let me know and I’ll fix the error both here and, if I can, on the imdb as well.)

And those are my picks for the best of Lifetime in 2018! (Lifetime had a pretty good year.) Now, I’m off to make my selections for the best of SyFy 2018! I’ll be back …. well, maybe not soon. It took me about three hours to do my Lifetime post. So, I’ll be back eventually.

Hill House has been remade many different ways. This time it’s done by Mike Flanagan of Gerald’s Game (Netflix). The show splits its time between then and now. It opens “Then” with Timothy Hutton in a very big and creepy house with a bunch of kids. We learn through A LOT of exposition that Steven has grown up to be paranormal writer. The cuts between then and now aren’t too bad, but it does diffuse the tension.

The kids handled the trauma of growing up in a haunted house with varied acceptance. Steven is a paranormal investigator. The oldest sister works at funeral home. Luke grew up to be an alcoholic. Nellie grew up to be disturbed. There’s another sister who’s a sex addict. I’m halfway into the episode and I am kinda bored. They try to sell the show as the next Stranger Things, but I’m not sure if this show is even the next Whitney. This show is a lot of things, but it is not worthy at this point of being in the same sentence as Season 1 Stranger Things.

This show has 20 minutes left to get good and my hopes are low.

Nellie is one of the many family members who has grown up all messed up. She is drawn back to Hill House I suppose because she wants to do some lawn maintenance.

The story, once again, shifts to the past and Steven and the dad need to escape the house because they are being pursued by a ghost. Apparently, their mom was possessed by a ghost and they have to flee and leave mom behind (awkward mother’s day coming up). Funny how divorce can just creep up on a couple after 20 years of marriage; you look over and realize that you and your spouse are different people; in that, you are a person and she is possessed by a demon.

Nellie has returned to Hill House literally and starts dancing around. It’s weird. The show jump cuts to Steven to an explaining session that her house is not haunted, but he’ll make it seem haunted in the book and the lady looks at him with contempt because he’s a fraud. We learn that Steven is a failed novelist who cashed in on the family drama by writing the Haunting of Hill House. This caused Steven and his sister to become estranged.

The show flashes back and actually does a good job at showing why Luke is so traumatized. Apparently, one of the Hill House ghosts was harassing him when he was young and that trauma triggered his lifelong addiction.

The show flashes to Steven again as an adult. He catches his brother with the substance abuse problem leaving his apartment with all of his electronics. Steven gets the brother to give him his stuff back. When he finally goes inside, he finds Nell at his home and the first scary thing happens in the whole show: Steve’s dad calls and says that Nell went to the hill house and she’s dead. So……the Nell that is in Steve’s house is a GHOOOOOOOST. BOO! Nell does some ghosty stuff that’s kinda spooooky.

I don’t know if there will be second review of this show. I will definitely watch another episode, but I’m not ready to get married to it yet. I think it could have some potential, but Stranger Things had me the first murder in the first 30 seconds. So far, this is more slow exposition than slow burn, but I will give it a fair shot.

When I first started to watch the 1994 film Legends of the Fall on Encore, I was a little bit concerned when I discovered that it was directed by Ed Zwick. After all, Zwick also directed Love and Other Drugs, which is one of the worst and most insulting films of all time. In fact, I nearly stopped watching when I saw Zwick’s name. But, largely because I want to finish up this series of melodramatic film reviews at some point in the near future, I decided to go ahead and watch the film.

And it turned out that Legends of the Fall is not a bad film. I probably would have enjoyed it more if I had seen it in a movie theater as opposed to on television but, considering that it was directed by Ed Zwick, Legends of the Fall is definitely watchable. If nothing else, it’s better than Love and Other Drugs.

Legends of the Fall tells the story of the Ludlows, a family that lives on a Montana ranch at the start of the 2oth Century. Starting with the final days of the Indian wars and proceeding through World War I and prohibition, Legends of the Fall covers a lot of historical events but does so in a very Hollywood way, which is to say that all of the main characters dress like they’re from the past but they all have very modern social attitudes. In this case, Col. William Ludlow (Anthony Hopkins) may be a wealthy white military veteran but he’s also totally pro-Native American. And, of course, all the local Native Americans love him, despite the fact that he’s a representative of the institutions that have destroyed their way of life.

Anyway, Col. Ludlow has three sons. The oldest, Alfred (Aidan Quinn), is serious and responsible. The youngest, Samuel (Henry Thomas), is naive and idealistic. And the middle child is Tristan (Brad Pitt), who is wild and rebellious and looks like Brad Pitt. You have to wonder how the same gene pool could produce both Aidan Quinn and Brad Pitt.

As the film begins, Samuel has returned from studying at Harvard. With him is his fiancée, Susannah (Julia Ormond, who has really pretty hair in this movie). Though she loves Samuel, Susannah finds herself attracted to Tristan, largely because Tristan looks like Brad Pitt. Tristan is also attracted to Susannah but he would never betray his younger brother. In fact, when Samuel announces that he’s enlisted in the Canadian army so that he can fight in World War I, Tristan and Alfred soon do the exact same thing.

War is Hell, which is something that Samuel discovers when he’s gunned down by a bunch of German soldiers. Tristan responds by cutting Samuel’s heart out of his body and sending it back to Montana. He then proceeds to go a little crazy and when we next see Tristan, he’s uniform is decorated with the scalps of dead Germans.

Meanwhile, Alfred has been wounded in battle and is sent back to Montana. Eventually, he ends up married to Susannah. And then Tristan comes back home and…

Well, a lot of stuff happens after Tristan returns. In fact, you could even argue that too much happens. Zwick obviously set out to try to make Legends of the Fall into an old school Hollywood epic but far too often, it seems like he’s mostly just copying scenes from other films. There’s a hollowness at the center of Legends of the Fall and the end result is a film that’s visually gorgeous and thematically shallow.

And yet, you should never underestimate the importance of looking good. Legends of the Fall is a beautiful film to look at and so is Brad Pitt. I wouldn’t necessarily say that Brad gives a particularly good performance here because, to be honest, Tristan is such an idealized character that I doubt anyone could really make him believable. But the Brad Pitt of 1994 looked so good and had such a strong screen presence that it didn’t matter that he wasn’t as good an actor as the Brad Pitt of 2015. Legends of The Fall is one of those movies that can get by on pure charisma and fortunately, Brad Pitt is enough of a movie star to make the film work.

Legends of the Fall is not a great film but it’s still not a bad way to waste 120 minutes. (Of course, the film itself lasts 133 minutes but still…)

Despite the fact that it was nominated for best picture and marked the start of his fantastically successful collaboration with actor Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film Gangs of New York does not have the best reputation. It always seems to be regarded as one of Scorsese’s lesser films and, often times, both The Aviator and The Departedare described as representing a comeback of sorts from Gangs.

To a certain extent, I have to agree. Gangs of New York is a lesser Scorsese movie but then again, a lesser Scorsese film is still a hundred times better than the greatest films from Brett Ratner or Michael Bay.

The flaws of Gangs of New York are many. The film, which tells the epic story of how an Irish gang led by Leonard DiCaprio battled a nativist gang led by Daniel Day-Lewis in Civil War-era New York City, runs for nearly 3 hours and yet it somehow still feels rushed and incomplete. Cameron Diaz is far too contemporary of an actress to be truly believable as a 19th century pickpocket. For that matter, Leonardo DiCaprio gives one of the worst performances of his career, coming across as being one-note and shrill. If you only knew DiCaprio from his work in Gangs of New York, you would have a hard time believing that he was capable of doing the type of work that he did in Inception or The Wolf of Wall Street.

And yet, Gangs of New York is one of those flawed films that I can’t help but enjoy.

First off, on a purely personal level, how can I not love a film about how terribly the Irish were treated in the 19th Century? Seriously, the Irish were regarded as if they were somehow subhuman. They were attacked for being Catholic. They were viewed as being criminals. An entire freaking political party — the American party — was formed specifically to keep the Irish out. But you know what? We Irish kept coming, we kept fighting for our rights, and now everyone wishes they could be one of us!

Secondly, and this should not a shock when you consider that the film was directed by Martin Scorsese, the film looks absolutely gorgeous! Despite the fact that it’s takes place in a 19th century slum and most of the characters are poor, Gangs of New York is a visual feast. I loved the ornate sets and all the colorful clothes. I loved the attention to detail that was put into everything.

(My favorite visual from the film: Daniel Day-Lewis and his entourage walking down a street while fireworks explode directly over Day-Lewis’s shoulder.)

Third, there’s Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as Bill “The Butcher” Cutting. One reason why DiCaprio’s performance is so noticeably bad is because he’s acting opposite Day-Lewis. Sporting a handle-bar mustache and speaking in an almost satirically exaggerated New York accent, Day-Lewis turns Bill into one cinema’s greatest villains.

But, perhaps the main reason why I enjoy Gangs of New York is because, as I’ve mentioned so many times in the past, I really am a big history nerd. And Gangs of New York deals with a period in American history that really doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves. While we all know that the Civil War started when the South seceded from the union, what is often forgotten is that the North was not united in their support of Abraham Lincoln and the Union. In fact, the Mayor of New York, Fernando Wood, was such a strong supporter of the Confederacy that he, at one point, suggested that New York City should secede from the union as well. And when Lincoln instituted the draft, NYC — and several other cities in the north — exploded into riots.

Of course, Gangs of New York is not a 100% historically accurate. For one thing, it compresses the time frame of the draft riots and — as films often do — it downplays the culture of Northern racism and instead portrays racists like Bill Cutting as being the exception to the rule. But, even with that in mind, Gangs of New York still serves as a good starting point for those who want to learn more about American history than what they’ve been told in school.

My favorite parts of Gangs of New York dealt not with how the gangs fought each other but instead how the gangs were used as political foot soldiers. One of the major supporting characters in Gangs of New York is William “Boss” Tweed (Jim Broadbent), a real-life politician who was at the center of one of America’s first major political scandals. When we first meet Tweed, he is using Bill Cutting’s gang to fix elections. However, as the film progresses, Tweed comes to realize that the political future of New York rests with the Irish. So, Tweed starts using the Irish gang to fix elections. For those of us who are into political history, the Boss Tweed scenes are a lot of fun.

Gangs of New York has its flaws. It’s the type of project that, if it were made today, it would probably be a series on HBO and it would win all sorts of awards. (Actually, it did kinda. It was called Boardwalk Empire.) It’s not perfect, but I like it.